Hallowe’en in Montreal and it’s so warm you can’t wear a jacket. Cruising through the gay district, the streets packed, you ask yourself, “Can it get any better than this?”
Apparently it can. When you return to your hotel room, can you believe it? You’re flipping through the channels and you find free porn. There’s a big erect cock taking up the whole screen. You remind yourself to check your hotel charges later but in the meantime, settle in to enjoy. The perfection of the evening is shattered, however, when the camera shot widens and you realize, “Oh my god, it’s het porn.”
You’re so keyed up by the first image that you try to talk yourself into liking this porn. You make a concerted effort to get into it and even manage to “rub one out.” But after your feeble climax you are suffused with shame and something much worse: boredom.
This particular porn channel features the same sexual script over and over: the sex partners meet and kiss; next thing you know there’s a shot of them both naked without ever having seen them undress. It’s always the same-she gives him a blow job, he goes down on her completely hairless pussy, they fuck with lots of in and out close-ups. There are actually three porn channels and as you flip from one to the other the various stages are identical. Free het porn, wahoo!
Gay porn is so much hotter. Why is that?
We asked some of our boyfriends if we could sample from their collection. At first they were very skeptical. “Is this a trick? I thought lesbians were against pornography,” said one guy. “I remember all those marches in the 1980s, and a bunch of dykes I lived with burned Hustler in front of a store.”
Yes, we told him, that was part of our history. There was a time not too long ago when the mere mention of pornography incited angry debate among feminists, pitting friends against one another and splitting community organizations. As feminists searched for an answer to why patriarchy endured throughout time and seemed so unrelentingly hateful toward women, pornography seemed, for a while, to offer a fairly simple answer. There were two issues: that women got abused in the porn production industry and that the images were themselves misogynist.
Arrest the porn producers and you get rid of one source of women’s abuse; get rid of porn and you get the nasty ideas out of men’s heads. But of course things are not so easy and porn moved lower on the map of major problems.
We did wonder, for just a second, if the anti-porn feminists of the past who saw fit to ally with the Christian Right might just be on to something when we learned that torturer and rapist Uday Hussein had a huge porn collection, but we got over that. Fighting for better working conditions for all sex trade workers and protecting the right of sexual consent seems to be a much better tactic than censoring desire. But we digress from the subject matter at hand.
When we looked at a sampling of our friend’s collection we noticed right away how much more narratively complex and cinematically elegant the gay porn was compared with the het porn or the lesbian porn. Maybe it’s because gay men aren’t embarrassed about watching porn, so they can demand a better product. Maybe its because gay men have simply spent more time thinking about the variety of things that can incite sexual desires-like the arrival of a pizza delivery guy?
It’s not like contemporary dykes invented it or anything, but there’s certainly a lot more public lesbian interest in “penetration” than there was a few years ago when it was considered to be symptomatic of patriarchal brainwashing. It’s a lot safer, now, for lesbians to confess their appreciation for gay porn. Explaining her appreciation for gay porn, one woman explained, “I watch lesbian porn but it’s kind of dopey and I feel embarrassed watching it in front of other women. But gay male porn is just so freewheeling. I mean, they just get right down to sucking and fucking and it looks like so much fun.”
Another woman told us: “I love watching guys stick their cocks into each other. And I really like cock, visually that is. I like the idea of cock but the sex just doesn’t work for me with a man.”
Interestingly enough, several lesbians told us that what they really like about gay porn is that they can watch some down and dirty sex without worrying about any of the parties involved. As one woman told us, “Until I can get porn where a fierce femme top fucks the brains out of a butch boy bottom, gay porn is the best. You get the boy-boy fuckfest without worrying about hetero inequality or dying of boredom watching a couple of dykes go down on each other or play with multi-coloured penises.”
What the fuck!
Why you can trust Xtra
